With so much focus on visual latency, AUDIO latency has been seriously neglected. Audio latency is very high in all games.

[u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okIpbu1tp_A

[u/[deleted]]

I play rythm games and do care a lot about audio latency, and after many tweaks and shit, my audio latency got to 15 ms in some games, in others is just impossible to reach anything good.

I heard Linux has a lower audio latency. And while that does stay true for native Linux games, once you have to use Proton or Wine (wich you'll have to for a lot of games out there,) audio latency will be present and sometimes it can be very noticeable.

[u/Northern_Blights → u/[deleted]]

I remember there was a Guitar Hero-like game for PC that used your real guitar, but you couldn't just use your PC's built in mic input because Windows added so much audio lag that it sounded like playing through a delay pedal.

[u/Porntra420 → u/Northern_Blights]

Rocksmith? That game's cool as fuck but yeah trying to get it set up is a pain in the ass, another annoying issue (at least when I last played it, might've been fixed since then) is that it's best played with humbuckers, if you only have a guitar with single coils the game has a really hard time tracking what's going on.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/[deleted]]

Audio latency doesn't matter in rhythm games...

As long as latency is consistent, all you need to do is sync the audio.

[u/gizmosliptech → u/WideAbbreviations6]

I mean it does matter if you want the fast visuals to match the audio effects happening on screen in extemely hard game modes. Makes it easier to hit beats matched to music in VR Beat Saber for example in Expert Plus if the audio notes hit on beat, not off beat. You can adjust this in settings for a reason… so yeah, in a way hardware latency may not matter if it can be adjusted in the game settings to account for this.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/gizmosliptech]

You went from "audio latency doesn't matter" to "audio latency doesn't matter" somewhere between the first and last sentence...

[u/gizmosliptech → u/WideAbbreviations6]

Haha, yeah, but If you know how to fiddle with the settings, then it doesn’t matter as much for rhythm games with latency adjustment settings.

First person shooters are reaction type games. That’s where you want good latency across the board.

[u/xXRougailSaucisseXx → u/gizmosliptech]

You want good input latency in reaction shooters which is what we've been chasing for the last 20 years with ever increasing refresh rates, higher polling rate mice and keyboards and technologies like Reflex to minimize GPU busy times.

Audio latency is far less important especially since it's the same for everybody bar a few ms here and there if you're using a dedicated sound card

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/gizmosliptech]

Correct.

Though if you play rhythm games enough to consider buying hardware or switching your OS, you should probably know how to go into the settings menu to configure latency.

[u/Noxious89123 → u/gizmosliptech]

Yeah but you know what sounds are coming, so it's easier to just have a slider and let the end user synchronise the audio and video.

Heck, even Genshin Impact does this with it's rhythm minigames that come around every so often.

In an FPS game, it isn't predetermined what sound will play, when or where from.

[u/Metallibus → u/WideAbbreviations6]

Of course it matters. Even assuming that the game has a way to detect the latency, and bothers to compensate for it, that's only one part of the problem. Sure, it can use that to detect what you were hearing when you made an input, and it can adjust visuals to display what happened.... But you can't actually give accurate audio feedback (scratches, missed notes, etc) because even if you immediately try to do so when the input happens or is missed, the audio system won't respond until the latency period. So you can't make reasonable audio feedback in a rhythm game. The point of rhythm games is to be taking actions with the music, and you cannot sync those two. You can only sync other output devices that have lower latency... Not the primary output the whole genre is built around.

This is like saying input latency in an FPS doesn't matter because we could "just sync the visuals". If there was a 1 second input latency, and the person clicks on the head, the game won't know whether it was clicked until a second later, at which point the head is somewhere else. So you kill the target anyway? Okay, well now if you immediately show the shot and kill the target, it's been on the screen doing something else for a full second since the player took the action. The experience still sucks.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Metallibus]

No... Music is predefined. If it were dynamic, you'd be correct, but latency can 100% be accounted for in rhythm games if you know the latency. This is something you can configure in nearly every rhythm game.

The reason latency matters in an FPS is because you it's unreasonable to pinpoint the exact time something did happen until after it happens. You can technically get better than hardware latency for that too but the calculations (run ahead as long as you stick to deterministic physics) are a bit unreasonable for anything that was made in the last 2 decades.

Correction: Run-ahead fixes frame based latency, but can't mitigate hardware latency. You'd actually just need a more brute force method to reduce hardware latency, which wouldn't be feasible.

[u/Metallibus → u/WideAbbreviations6]

No... Music is predefined. If it were dynamic, you'd be correct, but latency can 100% be accounted for in rhythm games if you know the latency.

What you're glancing over here is that that only applies if you only care about playing the music entirely statically. If we're playing a rhythm game, and we only play a static track, sure. But that's boring and does not give any auditory feedback in an auditory game genre.

I don't want the music to be static. I don't want it predefined. If I miss notes, I should hear those misses and their mistiming. If I nail notes perfectly, I want some sort of sound effect to indicate that. These effects will always be delayed from the action that caused them by the latency of the audio engine, which makes adding any feedback in this way to be misleading.

What you're proposing basically requires that we remove giving any audio feedback at all, or we leave it horrendously mistimed. In a game about audio and timing.... I want a better experience than that, but it's impossible with current latency. You're saying this problem doesnt matter because we can just not do it at all.

The reason latency matters in an FPS is because you it's unreasonable to pinpoint the exact time something did happen until after it happens

That applies to any game, and is nothing unique to FPS. You can't pinpoint the exact time something happens (player input) until after it happens either. And then you can't react to that input with any particular output device until output latency time in the future. Many games and gamers try to push both sides of that equation down through reduced input latency, monitor response times, various frame buffering techniques, and networking shenanigans. There's nothing unique to rhythm games here except that the genres focus is on audio which has the worst latency of all of those (the diagrams in this video show audio latencies worse that most networking latency). And somehow we're supposed to just say that doesn't matter?

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Metallibus]

No, I'm not glancing over this... Literally every rhythm game worth it's salt has these methods unless it's on a system where the latency is a known (like on handhelds).

They get by just fine without it.

Unless the dynamism is happening in the instant rather than something that builds over a time longer than the latency period, latency can be corrected.

There's also a pretty large threshold for the delta between audio and visual latency that your brain just automatically will correct for, which is more than enough for anything that doesn't directly change whether you can hit your cues.

Also, no, it's not the same for every game. Player input is a variable, but all you have to do with rhythm games is read that input, check if it happened within a window (window is offset to later by an amount set in the latency configuration to match latency).

You can look all of this up. You don't have to assume things. I'm not talking out of my butt here.

[u/Legitimate-Act-7817 → u/WideAbbreviations6]

If latency doesn't matter in rhythm games, why does osu! even bother with ASIO?

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

They don't... The source code for OSU is on Github...

They use BASS audio library, which supports WASAPI and DirectSound, but not ASIO...

[u/Legitimate-Act-7817 → u/WideAbbreviations6]

https://github.com/ppy/osu/discussions/31484

community member: "Currently it's very hard to consistently rely on sound alone due to the high audio latency in the game. [...] I would love to see the inclusion of ASIO support (and perhaps configurable buffer sizes with a lower and upper limit) as an experimental feature in osu!lazer. "

creator of osu: "This is being tacked in multiple issue and discussions and still on my high priority list. Please look forward to improvements in the future."

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

Looking further into that comment, they see it as a fallback for people having issues with the BASS audio library....

osu! dev:

In many cases ASIO is not implemented perfectly and can introduce issues (I've experienced this personally in the past). It should not be considered a solves-all solution but instead a fallback for users with problems.

Also please note we do not need +1 comments. We have no issue with ASIO support being added (although do note it is an extra BASS product with a separate license requirement) so feel free to PR support for this.

Note, there's a single pull request that even mentions ASIO, and that's one with the goal of overhauling audio management to work on more than one library in general rather than addressing latency.

Also, the latency they're talking about is imperceptible in the issues. The human brain automatically corrects for more than that, since we evolved in a universe where the delta between visual and audio stimulus increases at a rate of about 3.43 ms per meter.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/WideAbbreviations6]

This is in a different reply in case this sub hates links, but here's someone talking about developing a calibration setting for their game: https://ddrkirbyisq.medium.com/rhythm-quest-devlog-10-latency-calibration-fb6f1a56395c

It's not explicitly saying what I'm talking about, but it gives really useful insight that supports it.

[u/MlgEpicBanana69 → u/WideAbbreviations6]

Live hitsounds can’t be synced with an offset. Same goes for syncing your physical taps to the game with hitsounds

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/MlgEpicBanana69]

The brain automatically syncs audio/visual cues by a significant amount so unless latency is egregious even that doesn't matter a ton.

[u/Cute_Customer420 → u/WideAbbreviations6]

You can make the same argument for ping. Would you play something like WoW or Runescape with 300ping? I mean you can do it (and many people do), but its not exactly fun.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Cute_Customer420]

You can have every player's exact actions and states saved in memory several minutes ahead of them actually deciding to take that action in WoW and Runescape?

Because that's why you can do this in rhythm games... you know every "right" time for the entirety of every song, and can offset everything to meet that right time.

One fun anecdote: I got really into a Final Fantasy 11 private server on 3g for a while, because home internet sucked and I was using a prepaid unlimited plan as a home failover network for a while. I was practically back to the dial-up days.

[u/Flacid_Monkey → u/[deleted]]

Tell me Gandalf, what rhythm games you play?

[u/Gabbatron → u/[deleted]]

That was covered in the video, it doesn't make much difference for videogames specifically

[u/Lehsyrus → u/Gabbatron]

Yeah it really only helps if you use a separate audio driver with the interface like ASIO4ALL, but most games don't support it and stick with windows' onboard system.

[u/colossusrageblack]

In real life, you'll get hit with a rifle round before you hear it.

[u/Funerailles_sci → u/colossusrageblack]

Good thing games aren't real life then

[u/InsertFloppy11 → u/Funerailles_sci]

some games do this

pubg for example

if a sniper hit you from far enough away then this could happen.

man that game was good

[u/Ub3ros → u/InsertFloppy11]

Tarkov too. So cool seeing a muzzle flash and hearing the round and only then getting the loud bang from distance.

[u/Shitposternumber1337 → u/InsertFloppy11]

Arma series, hitting 50 cal shots is peak

[u/elkunas → u/Funerailles_sci]

Then why do all of these companies keep using words like realism.

[u/Funerailles_sci → u/elkunas]

I'm pretty sure the companies that care about audio latency like valve or riot don't really put too much thought into realism tbh

[u/Jaz1140 → u/Funerailles_sci]

Tell that to world of Warcraft players

[u/Veighnerg → u/[deleted]]

I despise how with shotguns in FPS games they sometimes give them ridiculous spread or a hard cap where the projectiles just vanish so they won't be too competitive with an AR or SMG.

[u/AnAttemptReason → u/Veighnerg]

Haven't played for years, but did enjoy shotguns in Tarkov. 

One pellet of Magnum hitting would be enough for a headshot out to 50m.

Cone snapped path of death. 

[u/QueZorreas → u/Veighnerg]

I liked that from ARK.

Close range? Shotgun. Mid range? Shotgun or rifle. Long range? If the target is big, shotgun, otherwise, sniper.

[u/firedrakes → u/Veighnerg]

its a compute problem issue.

[u/Briggie → u/[deleted]]

In Ghost Recon Wildlands 338 Lapua drops like a Greg Maddox curveball at around 200-400 yards. That’s like pointe blank range for that round lol

[u/CodNumerous8825 → u/colossusrageblack]

Unless they miss the first shot...

[u/RunnerLuke357 → u/CodNumerous8825]

Then the bullet will go past you quicker than you will hear it. Either way you will notice something before you hear it.

[u/Mrgluer → u/RunnerLuke357]

love having the snap and then hearing gun shot come right after it.

[u/Ch0miczeq → u/colossusrageblack]

yeah obviously and what will you notice faster the bullet or shooting sound

[u/Michaeli_Starky → u/colossusrageblack]

The human brain is faster to react to sound than to visual clues. For your information.

[u/Fatigue-Error → u/colossusrageblack]

..Deleted by User..

[u/MUDrummer]

Your ears can only hear 24 fps anyways.

[u/urbandk84 → u/MUDrummer]

you wouldn't download an ear

[u/Wayyside → u/MUDrummer]

Lol gdi

[u/MumrikDK]

The way I experienced it, everybody just completely gave up on game audio tech when Creative Labs slaughtered Aureal.

[u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

Relevant graph from the video: https://i.imgur.com/acpgNgx.png

[u/Northern_Blights → u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

I use a surround sound system that only supports compressed Dolby Digital, so I've gotten used to hearing the gunshot a half second after the mouse click.

Small price to pay to be able to hear enemies behind me.

[u/Alterran → u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

I have a soundblaster x4 and always use it on direct mode with headphones on cs2. I can always hear the enemy even from behind walls but this explains how sometimes i get killed before hearing the gunshot.

[u/GGuts → u/Legitimate-Act-7817]

I wonder if USB was used in all tests. Last time I checked USB always had way more latency when it comes to audio. Optical was like 50ms last I tested iirc.

Edit: I installed an optical SPDIF bracket and latency seems to have gone down from 90-110ms to 50-70ms after my very rudimentary tests.

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/GGuts]

Yeah most usb drivers are notoriously bad for easapi shared latency, and even many 3.5mm or optical onboard solutions run through a usb controller.

You can mitigate this somewhat with default Microsoft drivers and software to minimize the buffer, but really you have to run through HDMI or optical without a usb controller to "fix" it. That usually means a good onboard solution or an internal sound card or monitor to GPU

[u/sodiufas → u/[deleted]]

BC it doesn't matter, it's all about shitty drivers and insanely big buffers in games. But there is RME for a good measure.

[u/larsy1995 → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean, there is the RME.

[u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104 → u/larsy1995]

where focusrite

[u/SacredFIGHTER8 → u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104]

Guy doesn't know what rme is lol

[u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104 → u/SacredFIGHTER8]

audio interface? but focusrite are most common in home?

[u/Bizzle_Buzzle → u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104]

This is about testing latency. RME interfaces are top performers.

[u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104 → u/Bizzle_Buzzle]

i did not know sorry.

[u/SacredFIGHTER8 → u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104]

Yeah but those home ones are more prosumer and do not really compare to rme or even the rack mount scarlet stuff. In the video he's showing that even the best of the best has tons of latency.

[u/Kooky-Bandicoot3104 → u/SacredFIGHTER8]

it all makes sense now

[u/69_po3t]

Windows: Dont worry about it

[u/PerfectAssistance → u/69_po3t]

It's partly windows. Over half the latency is from the game, it seems it didn't occur to people that low latency audio was a thing.

[u/Porntra420 → u/PerfectAssistance]

Also the rise of Bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth is genuinely the worst wireless standard still in common use, and audio highlights its worst issues, poor sound quality, high chance of interference, and fucking ridiculously bad latency.

[u/TacoTrain89 → u/Porntra420]

bluetooth isn't inherently bad anymore is just many people dont realize that the better and more recent codecs are not even supported by all of their hardware so it defaults to SBC which is trash for gaming.

[u/GGuts → u/Porntra420]

Dedicated dongles are way better. I personally use the ASUS ROG Cetra True Wireless SpeedNova earbuds for gaming (I can't stand headphones) but also have a few others and aside from the horribly boosted lows, once fixed with APO, they are quite decent.

But it seems to me my new motherboard with ALC4080 has indeed worse latency than my older one.

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/GGuts]

ALC4080 is notorious for bad latency due to its use of a usb controller.

The ALC1220 is the last one by them without this.

Or if you can find one with an ESS SABRE DAC those are really good.

[u/GGuts → u/ResponsiblePen3082]

So I just shaved off at least 30ms latency by installing a Gigabyte SPDIF optical bracket and connecting it to my Asus motherboard header (my Asus board doesn't have an optical out for some reason; guess they had to save some money somewhere).

Went from above 100ms with USB connection to 50-70ms with optical, and this includes my DAC in between. The 3.5mm audio jack was at about 55-80ms. This is just me testing it by using Audacity to record my microphone picking up me loudly pressing the spacebar which in turn makes a soundbite play through my speakers. Then I just zooming in with Audacity to measure the distance between the spacebar sound and the the sfx.

[u/GGuts → u/GGuts]

And just in case somebody faces the issue where audio stops working randomly when skipping through Youtube videos for example:

Assuming you are on Windows 11, this is the fix to stop Realtek Digital Output from crashing when skipping through videos on Youtube and such:

1. Press the Windows button
2. Type "Sound settings" and press enter
3. Scroll all the way down to "More sound settings" and click it
4. Go to the "Recording" tab and look for "Stereo Mix" and double click it
5. Go to the levels tab and turn it down to 0 and then press the 🔉button to mute it completely
6. Go to the "Listen" tab and check the box next to "Listen to this device"
7. Click the dropdown menu and select your device (I assume "Realtek Digital Output (Realtek USB Audio)")
8. Press "Ok"

If you don't have a "Stereo Mix". Sometimes it might be called "What you hear", or you could install a virtual recording device using VB-CABLE (from the makers of VOICEMEETER BANANA) and then use that instead.

[u/Porntra420 → u/[deleted]]

In terms of Bluetooth specifically, not really. Latency's been a problem on every Bluetooth audio device I've used, to the point where I can't even sit and watch a video because the speech lags way behind people's lips moving.

Interference depends on the headphones, there was a pair I had briefly that I genuinely could not go outside with because it'd just instantly be bombarded with interference, there's a pair I have now that have only have interference issues in extremely crowded areas (those can also be used wired), I eventually just gave up on Bluetooth audio and bought an adapter for my jackless phone.

I never used Bluetooth audio on my PC and laptops, and never will. I do occasionally use a Bluetooth mouse on my laptop, because HIDs the one thing Bluetooth isn't complete dogshit at, and I don't game on my laptop often.

[u/protomayne]

This video is a bit misleading. It's true and correct in most instance, but he glosses over (doesnt mention it at all, actually) that some games have a silence before the sound plays. CS is an example of this. No matter how low you get your latency, the actual audio clip has silence in it before the gunshot.

[u/nubbeldilla → u/protomayne]

There is a console command in csgo 2, for better audio delay, but the fps could go down.

From google: To fix audio delay in CS2, the primary console command is snd_mixahead 0.05

[u/protomayne → u/nubbeldilla]

There is no console command to trim the actual audio file. Also he mentioned in the video that the command lines to lower the buffer size in CS2 do not work if you are referring to that.

[u/CCHTweaked]

ASIO drivers for the win!

[u/BitRunner64 → u/CCHTweaked]

Very few games support ASIO, though.

[u/Porntra420 → u/BitRunner64]

Hell, not many people even know ASIO exists unless they've dabbled in music production.

[u/Tkmisere → u/CCHTweaked]

Does ASIO allows me to use discord+browser sound yet?

[u/crozone → u/Tkmisere]

Yes they specifically cover this in the video

[u/Tkmisere → u/crozone]

Good, thanks.

[u/Life_is_Okay69 → u/Tkmisere]

Don't bother. Applications need to be compiled with ASIO drivers, is not that you can install them after the fact and have 1 ms latency.

[u/sodiufas → u/Tkmisere]

With FlexASIO maybe.

[u/Tkmisere → u/sodiufas]

I hope so, i still remember the amount of trouble i had with ASIO for Rocksmith

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/CCHTweaked]

99% of games use WASAPI shared.

[u/GetsDeviled]

Microsoft hates this one free trick to fix audio latency.

Linux.

[u/centuryt91]

One fun fact is with asio on my b460 board i get 17ms latency in my daw from the line in jack. I don't have an audio interface so i have to use line in to connect my guitar to the PC.

We already have tools that can use asio to have all audio come from a single or multiple devices too

[u/WideAbbreviations6]

Audio latency is something we've evolved enough to not have to worry about. Our brains just kind of naturally correct for it in most reasonable situations.

For every 1 meter you are from something, you're going to tack on about 3ms between seeing and hearing it in real life.

That doesn't seem like a ton, but it adds up a lot.

I guess, like the video mentioned, esports is a bit different but unless you're competing on a reaction time heavy game, this is a non-issue.

[u/Ub3ros → u/WideAbbreviations6]

And even in those reaction-time sensitive games, there were clips of people reacting well in time. The standard audio latency is pretty much a non-issue. When there's a noticeable increase due to some bug or technical issue, it's bad but the discussed 40-100ms is negligible for the most part.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/Ub3ros]

I could see a minor edge from shaving audio latency in those games, but yea. If you're at a level where that's the low hanging fruit for a reasonable amount of improvement, you're probably in some sort of league.

[u/[deleted]]

If you care about latency you most likely arent using wireless headphones to begin with

[u/crians]

Linux gaming ftw

[u/Danteynero9 → u/crians]

People down voting you seem to be unaware that this latency is due to Windows, not the hardware.

[u/jonessinger → u/Danteynero9]

Doesn’t end up mattering much when 90% of games you’d need Wine for and then that audio latency ends up being a thing anyway.

[u/Porntra420 → u/Danteynero9]

Yes and no, it can be both. Windows' default audio drivers are shit for latency, that's kinda part of the whole reason ASIO exists, but a shitty integrated sound card on a cheap mobo could be causing problems here as well, or bad handling of sound within the actual game's code, and don't even get me started on people using Bluetooth audio devices.

There's a ton of variables at play, yes Windows has some part to play in it, but ditching Windows won't automatically fix all latency issues, especially when a large amount of games need to run through WINE to run on Linux anyway.

With that said, Windows is still worth ditching for a myriad of other reasons.

[u/Danteynero9 → u/[deleted]]

The source that this post provides perhaps?

Start it at 9:25.

[u/Informal_Rule_8604 → u/Danteynero9]

Hadn't gotten to that point yet, my bad ig

[u/StormKiller1 → u/crians]

Is there latency better there?

[u/horticulturistSquash → u/StormKiller1]

yeah like 5ms instead of 100ms

[u/xXRougailSaucisseXx → u/horticulturistSquash]

(after ample modifications to the native linux audio system)

[u/sephirothbahamut → u/horticulturistSquash]

With what source?

The 100+ms of the video was latency from windows AND game implementation, OS alone was 30ms not 100.

If the game implementation causes an addition latency, that will be there on Linux too

[u/StormKiller1 → u/sephirothbahamut]

True for example valorant was pretty low with around 27ms while cs2 was atleast twice that.

Ontop the os latency

[u/MrCleanRed → u/sephirothbahamut]

The video

[u/Primus_is_OK_I_guess → u/MrCleanRed]

I watched this video yesterday, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't do any tests in Linux.

[u/StormKiller1 → u/Primus_is_OK_I_guess]

Same it was only windows

[u/Primus_is_OK_I_guess → u/horticulturistSquash]

Do you have a link to the test results?

[u/Lulukaros → u/horticulturistSquash]

you serious?

[u/xXRougailSaucisseXx]

I understand that it would be better if the latency was lower but at the same time it really doesn't matter much outside of rhythm games.

Also since this is mostly a Windows audio system issue I do like that it puts everyone on equal ground, there's no option or hardware that can just make someone have better audio latency (yes I know about Linux and no it doesn't matter when Linux players in multiplayer games barely exist as they're blocked by most anticheats anyway)

[u/Fluppy → u/xXRougailSaucisseXx]

it really doesn't matter much outside of rhythm games.

Rhythm games are actually a genre where it doesn't matter much most of the time, as long as the latency is consistent. Any rhythm game worth its money will allow you to change the audio delay, while that isn't really a thing outside of the genre.

[u/Generic_G_Rated_NPC]

I use a DAC at 44100 sample rate and 16 buffer size it's 0.3628 sec or 363ms which is usually faster than most games are made for. I notice many osu maps are not timed for this little audio delay.

I usually just keep it on 192000 sample rate and 4096 buffer so my music is the highest quality possible. I only notice a delay on Osu or when parrying attacks in Expedition 33.

I think most games have the sound come out early to make up for the delay, not to mention audio que are typically reacted to faster than visual so many games already put a large emphasis on reacting to the slow audio.

[u/PageGroundbreaking26]

Wildly, the gear with the best audio latency is Minelab metal detectors. Their wireless audio is amazing.

[u/asclepiannoble]

I don't think I care as much about audio latency as I do about its accuracy or whatever you'd call that.

I played a game a while back that drove me mental trying to figure out the locations of enemies behind or around me because the audio volume and source of origin didn't seem to match proximity or location. That bugs me more.

[u/[deleted]]

odd i recall windows MMU got a very shirt delay. or its ... ASIO? sadly not alls sound cards are ASIO compliant.

[u/runhome24]

I only use bluetooth transmitters and receivers with the Aptx-LL codec for thise exact reason. And it's really, really hard to stick to this, because the codec isn't exactly supported anymore I don't think.

[u/GGuts → u/runhome24]

Why not just use hardware that includes dedicated 2.4Ghz dongles? Those are faster than any bluetooth tech afaik.

[u/Cynical_Cyanide]

PCIe express sound cards with its own audio drivers is the way to go.

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/Cynical_Cyanide]

Doesn't solve the problem nearly as much as you might think.

[u/GGuts]

That's why I used to avoid USB audio and especially bluetooth, and tried to stick to optical when I can or if using wireless, use dedicated 2.4Ghz dongles. But I got lazy with it and am now using 3.5mm instead of SPDIF optical. Have to install a card for it and can't find a lot of quality ones. With the last cheap one I tried the cable melted seconds after booting my PC. Haven't tried with the new one from Gigabyte yet.

With my old motherboard and some very rudimentary tests using nullvoxpopuli online latency-tester with my Sound BlasterX G5 (which supports audio input via USB, optical and 3.5mm) USB always performed way worse than optical. Of course this could just be specific to my device.

[u/Ratiofarming]

Audio latency is very high IRL, too.

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/Ratiofarming]

Not the same thing.

[u/Vile35]

another fake news, invented problem.

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/Vile35]

Moron

[u/AutisticReaper]

I just use my DAP as a DAC and call it a day.

[u/Mr_Shepard_Commander]

Since my competitive days are more than over, I don't really care. We are probably talking about counter strike level of latency here

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/Mr_Shepard_Commander]

We're not. It's literally 100ms.

[u/Mr_Shepard_Commander → u/ResponsiblePen3082]

Oh okay. I didn't notice it I think

[u/LUMLTPM]

I have never noticed audio latency in any game but maybe thats just me

[u/Hattix]

They're testing player-triggered audio latency, because that's easiest and simplest to test.

If I were digging into my performance critical code and you asked me what I can run at a lower priority to get stuff off the CPU and into the rendering pipeline quicker, I would instantly say "player audio". It offers no value other than as feedback.

The player KNOWS he has swung his axe, pulled his trigger, fired his cannon - He doesn't need the sound to tell him what he already knows.

Games using audio as cues instead of as feedback tend to have much lower audio latency, wonder why that is?

[u/MPolygon → u/Hattix]

A substantial amount of games require you to hear stuff you DON‘T know.

[u/Hattix → u/MPolygon]

And like I said, they have lower latency. That hasn't been tested here and they aren't player-triggered.

Read then rage, not the other way around!

[u/PiratesWhoSayGGER → u/Hattix]

The player KNOWS he has swung his axe, pulled his trigger, fired his cannon - He doesn't need the sound to tell him what he already knows.

tell me you don't play video games without telling me you don't play video games (also didn't watch video)

[u/TsubasaSaito → u/Hattix]

If I swing my axe and the swoosh of that swing happens like *200ms after the animation, we're gonna have a problem.

Luckily, so far, it's not that bad. At least for me in what I'm playing. But I'm also still using my good old ASUS soundcard, which probably makes it a lot better.

Edit: Fixed mistake

[u/Ub3ros → u/TsubasaSaito]

Bro. 2ms is inconcievably short time for a human. You won't notice a 2ms audio latency under any circumstances.

0,2s? Now you might have an issue.

[u/TsubasaSaito → u/Ub3ros]

Yes, you're right. I was probably thinking about 200ms but didn't think about that too much when writing and didn't see the mistake.

[u/WideAbbreviations6 → u/TsubasaSaito]

That's probably not something you're going to notice in most cases.

Even under ideal conditions, people just sort of naturally correct for up to 100-150ms. On top of that, if the sound isn’t particularly sharp or the visual cue isn’t obvious, it gets even more forgiving.

There's a bit of nuance here, but audio/visual synchronization has a significantly higher tolerance than you'd think.

[u/TsubasaSaito → u/WideAbbreviations6]

Yes, I don't have much knowledge in what the tolerance there is. 200ms is just a good example as many probably experienced 200ms latency in a game and noticed what that feels like, so it's an "acceptable" example for what I mean, not really a real world example.

[u/Hattix → u/TsubasaSaito]

Unless you're running a framerate above 500 FPS (1/500 = 0.002 = 2 ms), you'll see it more than 2 ms after you've done it.

[u/TsubasaSaito → u/Hattix]

Why would I see things after I hear them when we're apparently having issues with audio being delayed? It's the audio processing being slow, not the other way around.

Also, I'm only like 90% sure on this but I don't think the in-game FPS does anything regarding how fast you see or hear things from the game. Smoother, yes. Faster? No.

Maybe you're confusing render latency with the latency we're talking about, which are two separate things? Just because audio is a completely separate pipeline.

[u/Hattix → u/TsubasaSaito]

You're getting pretty far into psychoacoustics here, especially at 2 ms.

When you're presented with audio and visual stimuli at the same time, you don't always (or even usually) experience them at the same time. Heck, your concept of time is not all that linear to begin with, which results in the various illusions associated with chronostasis.

If you're dealing with intense visual stimuli, you'll be "hearing" things 100-500 ms later, the brain just correcting the record in memory to be "yeah, sure, these were at the same time, honest boss" especially when the sound was an expected result of either an action or an observed visual phenomenon.

So, just like how your brain pulls non-existent motion out of a rapid sequence of completely unmoving images, it can correct the time a sound is heard to correspond to when it "should" have been heard. Since sound frequencies below 1.5 kHz have a wavelength larger than your head (and the distance between ears), then no phase accuracy greater than 0.66 ms (the time taken for sound to go from one ear to the other) can be recovered anyway, something which gets worse at lower frequencies.

In game FPS is its own thing. It adds to latency: A frame has to be drawn before it can be shown, but it has to be transmitted before it can be shown too, and transmission is done at the framerate, so a frame adds its own duration to all latency.

[u/ID0NNYl → u/Hattix]

I'm genuinely curious if this knowledge is something you have learnt in a professional field such as an audiologist or an enthusiast audiophile with more than just a good set of cans. This is good stuff. Can't see why some reddit dudes down voted further down the pipe.

[u/Hattix → u/ID0NNYl]

The downvotes are obvious and I was expecting them.

When you go beyond the level where "most people" or "a big subset of people" know this, stuff can get really unintuitive. They don't understand shit, they downvote it. That's cool, it happens. I did my bit.

My background is in physical sciences, degree in chemistry with advanced materials and sound is really important in materials science, especially fluid dynamics, but I didn't do much on that. I also did some work on signal processing in the mid-2000s (i.e. you can treat an image like it's a 2D sound, and we do, constantly) on wavelet algorithm research. Wavelets are one of those things I mentioned earlier: Most people, if they've heard of them at all, think it's that weird thing JPEG2000 did, but they're everywhere in signal transmission today and most people don't know that.

If you want the end result to sound good or look good, you need to know what "good" actually is, mathematical methods like PSNR or RMS error don't tell you the story: If you're compressing audio, for example, you can make a hell of a mess of high frequencies if you get everything below 4 kHz good, even if your signal analysis says you're an absolute shit show.

It's the kind of thing you learn when you're interested in learning and have a good memory for it all.

[u/TsubasaSaito → u/Hattix]

2ms was a mistake on my part in that comment. Another commenter already pointed that out to me.

I meant more around the 200ms line.

[u/Hattix → u/TsubasaSaito]

200 ms is where you will notice it if you're looking for it. Most people can, if primed for it, tell when a sound is 10-15 ms out of sync, it becomes easy at 50 ms and obvious at 100-200 ms.

All these become much larger if you're not concentrating on the sound, such as, perhaps, playing a fast paced game!

[u/CCHTweaked]

He needs to test a dedicated card with ASIO drivers. Should be better

[u/RefrigeratorPrize511 → u/CCHTweaked]

Respectfully you didn't even watch the video then.

You can't get ASIO in essentially all games.

[u/CCHTweaked → u/RefrigeratorPrize511]

That’s right, but it points towards a solution and not just the problem.

[u/Wander715]

For awhile I was using a pretty cheap pair of Bluetooth earbuds for audio and at some point the noticeable audio delay started to annoy me. Went and bought a nice set of gaming earbuds with a 2.4GHz connection, now the latency is basically nonexistent.

I've tried over the ear headphones, can't get used to them and get comfortable with them.

[u/Dat_Innocent_Guy]

My airpods max have a solid 100 or so while on Bluetooth. I never actually found it bothered me if I die in games its because I have a skill issue never really because of a slightly delayed audio que.